TORONTO — A recent story by Global News about a toddler swallowing a button battery is raising a number of questions, not about how this could have happened, but why it took healthcare providers so long to diagnose it.
According to patient advocate group Patients Canada, cases of misdiagnosis or mistreatment are quite common.
“It’s not just misdiagnosis, it’s mistreatment, it’s not knowing enough about the patient, what medication they may be on – the best estimate I’ve seen is we occupy the equivalent of nine 200 bed hospital in Canada doing the repair work for not getting it right the first time, so there is a huge cost to the system,” said Michael Decter, board chair of Patients Canada.
“We haven’t build a really strong out-of-hospital healthcare system. We haven’t built the 24/7 clinics, we haven’t given people really strong alternatives to that emergency room visit.”
Decter said that leads to huge cost that can have very serious results at the risk of the patient’s health.
In this case, two-year-old Katie Smith had a button battery lodged in her esophagus for four days before doctors at Ajax hospital finally did an X-ray following the persistence of her parents.
“We told him there was something wrong, but he told us to treat it like a cold or the flu … she was still gagging, very lethargic, not herself,” Katie’s mother Christina Smith said.
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The parents had gone to another hospital, a walk-in clinic, and to their family doctor prior to that and no one investigated where there might be something stuck in their daughter’s throat.
“Two hospitals, a clinic doctor, and our family doctor, not one of them ordered an X-ray,” Smith said.
Decter said the advice to patients is this; “do not leave a hospital without a diagnosis.”
“If they do not know and they cannot tell you what’s causing the trouble, be persistent and do some more testing and insist that they give you a diagnosis,” he said.
“You are entitled to that.”
For the healthcare provider it is important to listen.
“Trust parents, particularly the mother’s intuitions. There is a lot of scientific evidence to support this point that says a parent, particularly the mother, says I know there is something wrong with my child,” Decter said.
“They are usually right.”
Decter added that with so much stress on the system, patients, family members, and healthcare providers all need to work together to ensure proper patient care is received and provided.
“You have to be an advocate for the people that you love, you can’t trust that the system is going to get it right,” he said.
“You really have to be much more knowledgeable as a patient or a family member. You need to ask a lot of questions and you need to be your own patient advocator.”
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